Katharine Birbalsingh, headteacher of Michaela community school in Wembley, north London.
Photograph: David Jones/PA Wire

‘Why be normal … when you could be Michaela?” asks deputy head Barry Smith in his blog about the idiosyncratic institution where he works, Michaela community school in Wembley, north London. And boy, does he have a point.

Michaela, blazing a trail for supporters of a traditionalist ethos in state education and shortly to be the subject of a book edited by its head, Katharine Birbalsingh, may be many things. But “normal” it ain’t.

The school was at the centre of a row in July over a letter telling parents that children would be placed in “lunch isolation” if they fell behind with lunch payments. Now a freedom of information response has revealed at least one Michaela pupil spent a whole term eating basic meals away from peers, outside the dining hall, under this punishment. Three children have been disciplined in this way, each for at least two weeks.

Headteacher defends policy of putting pupils in 'lunch isolation'

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We have also seen a letter, signed by Smith and emailed to parents last month, requiring that lunch bills are paid half-termly and up front. Children on free school meals do not have to pay, but parents who are applying for them are told they still have to pay up front, with the money repaid if their application succeeds. Parents are advised they could put weekly child benefit towards paying for the meals.

Many schools allow parents to pay weekly or daily and, as the government indicated last month, there are many families who are only “just about managing” but are not entitled to free meals.

Birbalsingh says the school does support parents who are struggling. “Unlike most schools, Michaela ensures that every child receives a healthy lunch. To enable us to do this, we ask parents to pay in advance. This is not unusual and several months’ notice is given in order to help with budgeting.” She adds that pupils are put in lunch isolation only if their parents were able to pay but had chosen not to, and that isolation was not a penalty but “fun”.

Back to Smith’s blog, where he curiously writes of himself as the “miserable old scrote in the corner sucking on his Werther’s” and warns that some will lambast as “hyperbollocks” the material Michaela has “spewed out into cyberspace”. Strangely, elsewhere in the blog Smith seems to suggest Michaela pupils are inculcated with a sense of “otherness”, which means not swearing. Instead, they should aspire to be “top of the pyramid”. Only “‘normal’ people swear”. Michaela, he warns, is a “Marmite” institution. This seems unlikely to change.

Is reputation a touchy subject for chain?

An academy chain considered declining to take over a struggling school because of the potential risk to its “brand”, a document released under freedom of information reveals.

The minutes of a meeting in February of the E-ACT trust’s audit and risk committee show senior staff and trustees worrying that the unnamed Bristol school’s “poor exam results could trigger an Ofsted inspection”, which would lead to a “requires improvement” judgment after the takeover “resulting in damage to E-ACT brand”.

In the end, E-ACT did take on a Bristol primary it now names Hareclive academy, approved by the DfE. It says the discussion about its brand was all part of its “due diligence” and it was pleased to have received the department’s vote of confidence.

But the concentration on “brand” may be seen by some as another manifestation of increasing commercialisation in schools. And some might wonder why E-ACT was allowed to expand after Ofsted warned, just weeks before the meeting that it was providing too many of its pupils with a “not good enough” education. The chain lost control of 10 schools in 2014 after an earlier Ofsted report, so its reputation may be a touchy subject.